Chapter 15
Of Asam, we can say only this: that he buried his barbs in his own flesh, and never hurt another human being.
— The Gospel of the Worms
I came back on the train, traveling first class in my own compartment, a prisoner of my own falsehood and failure. It pulled into Catchknot late, so late that no one was at the station, and no one recognized me, a stolid toiling figure whose sickness-mask hid only dry skin and a quantity of scars.
I took a cab to the university district and then took up my suitcase — my pack was long gone — and tried to find the Shilaad School. Wandering didn’t work so well as it had, and so I hailed a cab, but the cabbie didn’t know where to find you either. I had to resort to a slow wend around the university district until I found your door. Strange, because the place is as familiar to me now as the artery’s course around the bone; my memory of it then seems to be from another angle and in another light.
I had a line to use — “Otile, I’m sorry about everything, teach me of the body”28 — but when the door swung open another woman sat by the desk and told me, as you had, that the clinic was closed. She was as subtly alarmed by my face as you had been, though for other reasons, and she said you were in bed and I needed to come back in the morning.
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28 !
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I did not sleep. I sat outside the lobby all night. At first it was only a temporary measure, sitting on my suitcase against the wall, but there were no cabs and it was not so windy, and above your sputtering doorway were the slumbering stars. A bit before dawn, the lantern went out, and then I was beneath the heavens as if underwater, in a sort of cold meditation. The stone walls around me seemed equivalent to the mountain. The stars seemed artful, very close, the band of the galaxy right by my head; they seemed a steam, a perfume. And they seemed to turn about me and not the mountain, which was dark against them.
Then you showed up, in a rough coat over your pajamas, smelling of sleep. I apologized for taking so long to come back and for not writing and for being a lying sack of shit. You said, “I was in a whole fucking relationship while you were gone.”
“Did it end?”
“Of course it ended,” you said, and sighed, pink bed-face turning to pink cold-face, and sat on the suitcase beside me. It was not a large one, and so you sat very close. “You look terrible.”
“I’m sorry.”
“No, it suits you.”
“I mean I’m sorry — I can’t begin to talk about the things I’m sorry about. I came to see you again because I’m sick and I need curing.”
“Is that a come-on?”
“It’s a metaphor.”
“Come in and get some breakfast before you make any more metaphors.”
We had breakfast in a cold institutional kitchen in the basement of the Shilaad School. You brewed me tea and porridge and gave me nuts and cold fruit. I told you all about it.
“And is she going? All the way up there?”
“Yes. The queen is going to fund her. And her followers love her, the money’s pouring in.”
“And you have no regrets?”
“I regret letting people step on my face to go higher,” I said. “But mostly I regret helping them, just because it felt like a kind of revenge.”
“Well, Lamat,” you said, “you never lied to me.”
Two years went by. I grew used to reckoning time in years, not from beat to beat, but from measure to measure. There’s nothing natural about it, but perhaps there’s nothing natural about anything we do. We’re little beings with soft skin that grows wet at a touch, with claws of soft keratin. How have we survived so long, when our idea of defending ourselves is to show our attacker a palm? Not by natural means.
I stayed with you, and you did teach me. My God, you made a doctor of me. You showed me everything Courer had known and more, because you had found out more since Courer had died; I learned how to help at births, how to amputate rotten limbs, which pills and herbs worked for sour stomach, bloody nose, organic despair, and weakness of the body. I stayed, hidden from everyone, in my mask, which none of the patients believed in but were willing to pretend that we did.
And at last an invitation came, on a tall thin sheet of paper, in the queen’s own hand. I had seen that signature flourished like a sword, inlaid in the walls of museums and on the new compact of the city in the library, and the ink of it had touched the inside of the envelope while it was still damp, which had left a mark.
I went down the brick staircase to the basement, where you were standing at the sink in your gray dissection apron, holding a brain. Natural light spilled in from the high windows, and the room on a whole looked like a water tank, empty but with a spillage of wavering lines on the ceiling from the scattered metal pans and instruments on the tables.
“What’s that?” I asked.
“Shit, I don’t know.” You turned the brain in your hands, carefully — it was a few days old and hadn’t been preserved, and had a telltale looseness to the surface. “It was a donation. I kind of want to put it in formaldehyde and use it for lectures. It’ll fall apart if we dig into it.”
“What happened to the rest of him?”
“Her. They wanted something to bury.” You put it back onto the table and said, “You just don’t want to turn a brain down.”
“Right.”
“What do you have there?”
I showed you the invitation, and I said, “Disaine’s launch. I don’t want to go. Do I have to go?”
“I won’t make you go.” Your loose brow gently rose. “It would be hard for me not to.”
“You can go dressed as me.”
You said “ha,” rather than laugh, and sat down in a heap on the steps. I sat down next to you and felt the spread of your hip against mine.
“It’s already over,” I said. “That’s all.”
“But to see it go up,” you said.
“I’m surprised to hear you say that. You’re not an explorer.”
“I like to see things blow up,” you said, “and I’m told it blows up, to get where it’s going.” Then you leaned your warm head on my shoulder.
We sat quietly, and I thought of Disaine, of those days when I had felt my friend’s warm bone-studded back as I helped her forward. I said, “It’s not over, but it wouldn’t help.”
We watched it from the roof of the school. There were many people gathered on roofs that day — a whole congregation, quiet and still, without the feeling at all of spectators at a play or a fire or even a sermon. People seemed frozen as if in the first moment of grief, when the fingers give way. You set up chairs for the students and sat, yourself, just by the raised edge of the roof, with your arms up on it and your chin resting on them. Your foot stroked the roof, once, twice.
It went up just when it was supposed to, three o’clock in the afternoon. One moment the sky was blue and softened by clouds, and the next there was a flash, as if the sun had become a streak instead of a circle. A great column of cloud and something streaking above it, just ahead (it seemed) of its persecutors, something bright-metallic and almost too small to see. I felt your hand tighten on my arm. We watched it until it plunged through the sky and came to the top of the mountain, and flashed again, and disappeared, and then the mountain rose up the same as ever.
Faith, Disaine, and virtue.
I don’t know if one more bit of her diary will help. This is in the convent where she went to stay after the balloon accident, when she was trying to decide whether to go and meet you or not. I think she hurt herself on purpose. I can’t like her, I never will, but sometimes I think she would have understood me well. Maybe that’s just what prophets do, what their job is, to make us think so. – O
I am in the convent hospital. I have hurt my foot and my hand, the bad hand — well, I guess both my hands are bad, but I mean the left. I have been on my own for a good while right now because the sisters have taken their silent vows for Halem, and in this convent Ha
lem is 14 days long. It’s making me loquacious, and they avoid me because they want to reply. Nice women, I always forget. You can’t forget that niceness is rare, and a great virtue. It means a quickening to others and a desire to please. A cloven feeling like a mirror, making you both happy simultaneously, one move, one gesture, no gap. I am not nice, ever.
I have been thinking of what I would learn, if I could learn anything. I figure — what? I have ten years of life left. Not twenty, unless I’m lucky, and I’ve never been lucky. I’ve lived hard. I’ve breathed some things you shouldn’t breathe, chemistry and theology both; I’ve inhaled so many poisons in the service of prophecy, and I’ve failed myself in so many ways.
And I keep coming back to this one thought, which even I know is mad: why did he do it?
This question takes my breath away. It is a question we’ve hidden by believing in various answers already, and yet it is the great question that we ask of all suicides — the one we ask when we have been impossibly hurt. This hurt is what the answers hide. If Asam was wise and Asam was kind and Asam was nice, then why did he leave us?
My hospital room has a view of the mountain. We are so far from it that it looks small, although really we are on it already, I think; I think that properly measured the mountain goes to the floor of the continent, maybe to the heart of the earth. I imagine its root, solid impossible rock, penetrating even into the molten core and maintaining its chill. I think that this is something Lamat Paed understands. I wonder if Paed is alive or if she has already cast herself away. She is drawn to this too, in the way of another faith (I think the Holoh are trying to hide, not why did he do it, but why has this been done to us).
I imagine myself rising from this bed and floating toward the mountain, through a storm, maybe, because why not — I love drama. But through a storm, silent like a ghost, still like a ghost, toward the flash and flutter of light on the mountainside. I wouldn’t need to make it. I don’t think Asam made it. But to know something of how he felt, that would be worth it. I think Asam is the only person in the world that I would really like to get to know better. The only person I have loved, certainly, because he had a pure niceness that I can only just imagine. I wish that he would touch my head and tell me things.
When my foot is healed I will learn to climb. I will leave here for a fortnight. Only that, just to feel a slice of cool breath — I have been here for too long. I want to run over cold ground and feel the sun and look silly in my robe. A low sky, spread over a long ground. This world is too beautiful to waste.
It’s probably a terrible hill to die on, but I’ve never picked a good one yet.
Any final words? – O
I live almost like a prisoner now, or a hermit. I don’t go out much to look at the mountain. It reminds me too much of what I’ve lost, the easy muscles of my palms and thighs, the way I could read the stones buried under the snow, the way I used to care for the villagers’ and the travelers’ pains with certain doses of liqueurs. I stay in the building, masked when patients come, and I study the body as once I studied the mountain, though I know it is hardly God’s body.
I do it for Courer. I would say that I do it for you, my love, but it wouldn’t be true. I want to do all sorts of tribute to you, because you are living and have many tributaries; Courer is a gash of underground water, because she is dead. I can’t become the person I’ve lost, but I can try to understand her with my adult’s mind, with the mind that the girl who lost her couldn’t begin to imagine.
But I long to climb again, though I know I will never return to the southern face of God. And I have the idea that after I have finished this book, when you have looked up from your patients a minute, when the other women from the school have a few days’ holiday in the spring, we can leave the city under the thin cover of night, and take the train past Som-by-the-Water, and come at last to Mt. Ksethari. There we can rent gear, and I can show you how to use an axe although we will not have to. We can climb the mountain in a day. A bartender can learn physick and a climber can learn to love a hill of ten thousand feet; it is all only a matter of dosage.
I will take great pleasure in guiding you there. It will be my first summit.29
* * *
29 Lamat, I know you are worried about telling the truth. But I will tell you this: you know that this is the closest to the truth that anyone can come. If you want to hear me say it, I will. I’ll say it in the dissection room, and I’ll say it in our bedroom with the duvet crumpled on the floor, and yes, if you really want, I’ll say it on top of Mt. Ksethari. I hope you understand, a book like this wouldn’t give anyone mountain-fever, but a day on a springy hill does sound nice, so long as you can guarantee that nobody will lose any fingers or die of asphyxia. If I am to take my first vacation, I want it to be a vacation from death, in air.
Lamat, the doctors of one hundred years hence will be less ignorant than I. But the climbers of a hundred years hence will never climb like you.
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About the Author
Isaac Fellman is an archivist in Northern California. He writes sharp, painterly science fiction and fantasy about his various preoccupations: art history, extreme survival, toxic love, queer identity, and terrible moral choices. Most of his protagonists are great at exactly one thing and are continually prevented from doing it. The Breath of the Sun is his debut novel. He does not climb mountains.
Contents
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
About the Author
Landmarks
Cover
Table of Contents
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
About the Author
The Breath of the Sun Page 25